In fact, until just a few mornings ago, when I set aside what I should have been doing in order to finish up this book, I was more than a little ambiguous about his work, having previously read Changing Places and Nice Work with no more than mild pleasure and a fair bit of tuning out in the more long-winded bits.

This confession out of the way, I must say that I really like what he has done here. Therapy has struck an appealing chord with me, despite its narrator being of the wallowing sort, mired in his narcissistic bog, gazing pensively at his own reflection even as he continues to sink further and further down into a stinking morass of his own making.

Laurence “Tubby” Passmore, serendipitously successful writer of a long-running sitcom, The People Next Door, is feeling down. Really, really down. There’s no logical reason for it, as he continually reminds himself. He’s making more money than he can spend; his thirty-year-old marriage is placid and his university professor wife is keen on keeping up their sex life; his grown children are well launched; he has an outlet for sharing his thoughts with his platonic “mistress” in London, where he keeps a pleasantly-appointed luxury flat for overnight stays; his rural home is a welcome haven after days spent in the city; his posh silver car (the “Richmobile”, of unspecified Japanese make) is absolutely fabulous; and his various therapists – Miss Wu for acupuncture, Dudley for aromatherapy, Roland for physio, and Alexandra the cognitive behaviour therapist – are solicitously caring and even somewhat helpful, giving short periods of relief from his overwhelming emotional blah-ness.

To be sure, there is that nasty thing with his knee, those occasional searing twinges of excruciating pain which occur at random and which have defied surgery, but surely that can’t account for the pervasive feeling of gloom which has settled around him, his eternal angst-ridden state, his abstraction which is starting to affect all of his relationships. But at least things are stable on the home front. For, after all, with three decades of marriage one comes to rather rely on one’s loyal spouse for eternal acceptance and understanding…

While mulling over his own personal Existentialist Dread, and doing a bit of research on the topic as a whole, Laurence happens upon the name of Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, and, upon delving into Kierkegaard’s Journal, becomes obsessed with the man, finding – or perhaps more accurately, fabricating – parallels between their two dissimilar lives. As he becomes more and more emotionally involved with the philosopher, Laurence’s grip on his real life loosens even further, which is perhaps why his wife’s calm statement that she is leaving him comes as such an unexpected shock.

Therapy is a lot of fun to read, cringe-worthy narrator and all.

It is divided into four segments, the first being a straightforward, tell-all journal, with Laurence’s musings on the various structures and forms of writing obviously (and most interestingly) reflective of David Lodge’s own thoughts on the topic. The second section of the book is a collection of character portraits of Laurence written by him from the perspective of a number of his intimate associates, followed by a poignant flashback episode to Laurence’s teen years and his first love, the virginal (and staunchly Catholic) Maureen. Here is where the narrative takes an interesting though rather predictable twist, leading into the fourth section, which serves to bring Laurence’s narrative to a conclusion by sending him on a very personal pilgrimage along the road to Santiago de Compostela.

David Lodge is a very engaging writer, being just crude enough in his humour to elicit a certain amount of vulgar snickering, and then soaring away from the muck with some truly poignant bits of prose regarding the human condition and our universal quest for self-knowledge and the eternal why-are-we-here. Occasionally the navel-gazing gets a bit intense, but if one can soldier on one is rewarded by some gloriously funny bits, and some rather terribly true and relatable reminders of the absurdities of interpersonal relationships. (And the actual therapy episodes – of all sorts – are tellingly described and possibly the most deeply humorous bits of the book.)

I found myself mostly in sympathy with Laurence Passmore, despite the ick-factor of Lodge’s detailed descriptions of his sexual woes – for what with Laurence’s age (late fifties), physical condition (not great), and emotional turmoil (excessive), things are getting a bit difficult to, um, sustain in that department – which were kept from being too off-putting by the aforementioned humour of the author. (Though I’ll never be able to look at a bottle of Paul Newman’s Salad Dressing in quite the same innocent way again…)

Laurence/Tubby hits rock bottom, but struggles to his feet, and his redemption, though utterly predictable, left me feeling downright cheerful.

What else? Let’s see…

Grand glimpses of the actual process of creating sit-com episodes; the television studio bits are nicely done.

I rather liked the flashback sequence to Laurence’s teen days and his first love Maureen. Rather sweet, and an interesting excursion into a more innocent(ish) past, teen courtship-wise.

All in all, a decent read in a modern-light-novel sort of way, with the bonus of a mini-course in Kierkegaardian philosophy, delivered quite painlessly.

I do believe I may be reading more of David Lodge in the future, though I will allow a decent interval to pass before tackling him again. Enjoyable as I ultimately found it, I was very ready to be done with this book when I did close the last page; at over 300 pages it was a significant investment of reading time and attention, and there was a certain amount of authorial musing here and there which took some concentration to properly absorb.

Her Grand Ducal Highness the Princess Priscilla of Lothen-Kunitz was up to the age of twenty-one a most promising young lady. She was not only poetic in appearance beyond the habit of princesses but she was also of graceful and appropriate behaviour. She did what she was told; or, more valuable, she did what was expected of her without being told. Her father, in his youth and middle age a fiery man, now an irritable old gentleman who liked good food and insisted on strictest etiquette, was proud of her on those occasions when she happened to cross his mind. Her mother, by birth an English princess of an originality uncomfortable and unexpected in a royal lady that continued to the end of her life to crop up at disconcerting moments, died when Priscilla was sixteen. Her sisters, one older and one younger than herself, were both far less pleasing to look upon than she was, and much more difficult to manage; yet each married a suitable prince and each became a credit to her House, while as for Priscilla,—well, as for Priscilla, I propose to describe her dreadful conduct.

German Princess Priscilla is finally facing an appropriately marriageable suitor, a personable prince with a suitably secure income, and all that is left is to arrange the formal engagement. But the princess is suffering from what would vulgarly be called “cold feet”, so she dreams up a plan to escape from her overly lavish courtly surroundings, “where one is never alone”, by taking up an incognito life in an English country cottage with her personal mentor, the elderly ducal librarian, who sympathizes with Priscilla’s secret desire to pursue the beautiful simple life.

Bribing one of Princess Priscilla’s maids to go on ahead and meet them in Cologne, prefatory to travelling through France and crossing the Channel, Priscilla and Herr Fritzing disguise themselves in old clothes, scarves and veils and depart the castle on bicycles. Luck smiles on them; they make a clean getaway, and eventually fetch up in the English countryside, where they turn a sober village upside down by their joint combination of well-meaning naïvety and high-handed snobbishness.

Two young men fall immediately head over heels in love with the oblivious princess, two households are bitterly disrupted, and then the cheerful farce of this improbable adventure turns even more sober when Priscilla’s thoughtlessness and misplaced generosity causes a hitherto honest young woman to turn thief through irresistible temptation, and an elderly woman to be murdered for the money Priscilla has given her.

Once luck deserts the two idealistic German vagabonds, it does so with a vengeance. Their emotional maid, deeply resentful of her lowly position and the assumption that she will take on menial tasks unthought-of in castle days, blackmails Herr Fritzing for his last penny. The indignant mothers of Priscilla’s two local suitors descend upon the household with their respectively outraged and tearful maternal woes, and the local tradespeople send in their bills and refuse to extend any more credit to the suddenly-beleaguered establishment.

Luckily this is by way of being a fairy-tale-ish confection, and a bold rescuer appears from an unexpected direction. Priscilla comes away from her rural fortnight a much sadder and wiser young woman, and the obvious morals are writ large in bold letters all over the concluding chapters.

This playful story with a semi-serious message is a very readable light novel, something along the lines of The Enchanted April and The Jasmine Farm in tone, with a similarly neat and tidy satisfactory ending. Perhaps not one of von Arnim’s best and most complex works, but more than acceptable for cheerful diversion, and charmingly witty, with the author getting her usual digs in at the Germanic patriarchy’s tendency to squelch their women into an acceptable meekness.

Here is Princess Priscilla at Project Gutenberg, and here are several other favorable reviews:

Header Image

Rudbeckia in September.

Search for:

Follow Blog via Email

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

These “Reviews” and Ratings

I am merely a reader, a consumer of books for amusement and personal instruction, not a professional reviewer - and that is indeed a worthy profession, an important literary craft - so these posts are merely meant to be one person's reading responses, not scholarly reviews.

Early on in this blog I began rating the books I talked about on a 1 to 10 scale; it was meant to be a quick way to communicate my personal degree of satisfaction/pleasure (or the opposite) in each reading experience.

To emphasize: These are very personal, completely arbitrary ratings. These are merely meant to be a measure of the book's success in meeting my hopes and expectations as a reader.

5 & higher are what I consider as "keepers", in various degrees. A 10 indicates that I can think of no possible improvement. Ratings under 5 are rare & I struggle with giving those, but in all honesty sometimes feel them appropriate for, again, undeniably arbitrary and very personal reasons.

Each book is rated in its own context, NOT in comparison to the entire range of literature, which would, of course, be an impossible task.